Dungeon Dilettante
Posts: 4
Joined: Friday, 22nd February 2013, 15:41
Playing pure Summoner is not fun
Summoning is weak, tedious and less fun than other spellcasting schools.
Despite having one of the most climatic spells in the game like Malign Gateway or Haunt playing pure summoner feels like picking a worse magic school, like you are trying challenge mode which is not only harder but most importantly unnecessarily tedious and boring. I am not even talking about balance e.g. how much damage conjuration spells can inflict in comparison to summoned cratures (conjurations win most of the time), but about the fact that summoning tends to be unreliable, summoned beings are hard to controll and you cannot be sure about their next move. Enemy monsters abjuring your summons and flooding you with theirs is one of the most unfun combat mechanic i have ever encountered in roguelike. Summoning has probably one of the strongest miscasts effect, it can royally screw you, much harder than taking unavoidable damage from conjuration misscast. The idea is why would you play summoning if conjuration is stronger, safer, more reliable and is not affected by strange anti spell school mechanic. When you play Summoner you dont feel as powerfull like you do when you cast high level conjurations clearing entire screen of enemies in one or two casts and that is exactly what makes playing spellcaster fun in computer game. Currently you dont feel powerfull enough as a summoner in DCSS.
Couple of ideas to make it more fun:
- summoning lacks spells that crates 'wall' of monsters which would physically protect you from enemies (beings summoned with such spells would constantly follow you and place themselves between you and your enemies with no need to order them to do so). If this is not possible how about 'Taunt' mechanic that would force enemies to attack your summons
- I would like to be able to give orders and see an indicator of the order on the target enemy (visible marker on enemy icon), after taking order my summons would behave exaclty the way they are supposed to - stop doing anything but chasing or attacking the target. Currently ordering my summons does not necesarilly make them follow the order.
- i belive we need more smite-like summoning spells, to make dangerous targets elimination easier
- the fact that abjuration was removed from player spell pool but late game monsters still have accesss to it makes me want to stop playing summoning entirely. Seriously just go conjuration and forget about any issues. In comparison, Conjuarion spells have no issues. Resistances are easily managable.